The students in our classrooms are technically digital natives; however, this does not mean they have the necessary skills to be successful in digital learning. It became clear to me last year as we moved over night to online learning that my students did not have the “academic” technical skills needed to be successful. I had both 6th and 7th grade classes, and I was amazed at what students didn’t know how to do. Not only did they not know how to navigate our LMS, they didn’t have the basic skills of downloading documents, using a split screen, or uploading documents.
Knowing this, I made the decision to spend several class periods at the start of this school year on basic “academic” technical skills. I created practice lessons for students to explore our district’s new LMS. These lessons included videos and documents that students could refer to when they needed help. It’s still frustrating to get blank documents submitted after 8 weeks of school; however, I can’t imagine how much worse this would be if we hadn’t spent time on the basics.
A Note: It was a struggle to teach these skills to students when each student had a different kind or brand of device. Some were on laptops, desktops, phones, or iPads. Some were on Apple products, Dell products, or Chromebooks. Not having each of these types and brands of devices made it a challenge to trouble shoot. A positive of this was that students took on the tech support role and volunteered to help each other. They were a great support for each other and helped their peers in ways that I couldn’t do.
Sources:
A Teacher's Ponderings 